Asked when the water could come back, he said: “It could come back very quickly, or slowly over the next couple of days. It’s not a sign of a tsunami, but you wouldn’t want to be standing out on the ocean bed when the comes back.”

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, added on Twitter: “Looks similar to what can happen in run-up to tusnami, but in this case likely combination of very low tide and offshore wind from Irma.”

The phenomenon was last recorded in 1936, when the water was sucked away from Acklins Island, said Wayne Neely, a forecaster at the Department of Meteorology in Nassau.

Florida’s oceans also recede

On Sunday, as the Hurricane Irma moved through Florida and brought heavy flooding to the east coast, the ocean shrunk away from the beaches around Tampa Bay, on the western Gulf coast. The National Weather Service confirmed the phenomenon was also occurring 160 miles away in Naples, Florida.

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